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Recordings

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

'An unqualified success … a glorious interpreter, warm-voiced and wholly in sympathy with the task in hand. The famous cycle Frauenliebe und Lebe ...'The care that has gone into the literary and musicological side of the project is perfectly matched by the musical results. Banse proves to be a wond ...» More

'Schäfer evokes comparison with Elisabeth Schumann and with the young Elly Ameling, whom in tone and freshness of response she often resembles. In sum ...'Her voice combines ethereal radiance and clarity with resolute, unwavering focus. Johnson's account of the piano parts is superlative [and] his bookl ...» More

This is one of Schumann’s most exquisite miniatures. Bare on the page, the appearance of the printed music gives little indication of the song’s power in the hands of the right interpreters; because of a general tendency to ignore the late songs of Schumann, these have not been many and illustrious. If Schubert had not composed his immortal setting perhaps we should know this song far better.

The hallmarks of the late style are evident at a glance: eccentric spacing of the chords leaves a wide gap between left hand and right, but this somehow aids the impression of something monumental and adds to a strange and brooding sense of majesty in the setting; the prosody is unconventional—the word ‘allen’ is elongated on two minims which shoots the poem in the (metric) foot and delays the advent of ‘Gipfeln’ which the ear, reacting to the poem’s metre, expects sooner; various rhythmic devices seem thrown together arbitrarily—minims, crotchets, quavers, crotchet triplets. All of this is unimportant when the music comes to life in performance. The effect is rapt, perhaps even serene, but not comfortable—it is the poignant reaction of an ailing artist longing for peace which applies of course to the composer, but also the ageing Goethe returning to Ilmenau and reading the all-too-prophetic text inscribed by him on the walls of a mountain hut many decades earlier. His own words have come back to haunt him and his reaction in Schumann’s setting is sadder than in Schubert’s. With Schubert we sense something transcendental and at peace—his Goethe sings in such a way as to suggest a man who recognises that death, however sad it is to say goodbye, is a natural and inevitable part of life. With Schumann there is more anguish and sickness. He seems not to have been influenced by Schubert’s setting, but Sams points out that he may have had Meeresstille in mind. The upward jump of a seventh between the last two notes (‘du’ and ‘auch’) is of a heart-stopping poignancy only equalled by Wolf in So lasst mich scheinen when Mignon floats up an octave between the words ‘ewig’ and ‘jung’ and in so doing seems to turn her face imploringly towards the light of youth and heavenly grace. The setting of Liszt, not nearly so compact as this one, has several things in common with Schumann’s; solemn minim chords at the opening which suggest the slow raising of a Wagnerian curtain, a similar sense of grandeur and an octave jump, downwards this time, at the end. The Liszt song is from as early as 1848, and it would be interesting to know whether Schumann knew it and allowed himself (considering his dislike of Liszt’s music) to be influenced by it.

One wonders whether Schumann knew Schubert’s long flower-ballad Viola (published in 1830) where the fate of a helpless and abandoned flower is decided by the weather. When listening to certain passages in Schneeglöckchen, the similarities seem too strong to be coincidental. We must admit Schubert’s musical superiority, both in terms of musical invention and a command of rondo form which was even praised by Tovey in an analytical study. And the poem about Viola by Schober (although easy to decry as sentimental) seems positively masterful when compared to this anonymous hotch-potch.

From the opening, the scale of the music, and the prosody, seem somehow inappropriate for a snowdrop. It is as if a song about a starling were conceived in terms of an scena for an eagle. The vocal line is far from shy and retiring. Indeed it is a challenge to any soprano. Instead of diffident little notes betokening grace and exquisite smallness, healthy minims and dotted minims (one of these, a top note poised shamelessly on the awkward and inappropriate word ‘und’) need to be filled with sound in a tessitura that discourages intimacy of mood. The word ‘Schneeglöckchen’ itself is set on a drooping chord which suggests the flower’s plight, but for ‘das fremde blasse Kind’ the composer’s empathy seems to have abandoned him; the music here seems the epitome of health. There are pomposo rumblings for ‘und plötzlich brach mit Pomp und Braus der alte Winter auf’ which are complicated by rhythmic hiccups due to a change to 2/4 for ‘alte Winter’ – a hemiola which seems to accomplish very little that is usefully expressive. It seems that the composer is more interested in composing a piano piece with incidental words than a song which obeys the text. This is rare, but then so is an anonymous text. It is as if the unknown provenance of the words has freed Schumann from any sense of responsibility to a respected collaborator.

The first movement of the piece has been characterised by a high-lying vocal line accompanied by rolling quaver arpeggios. At the beginning of the poem’s third verse the speed changes to that of a weaving scherzo in the Mendelssohn manner. Here we find a harmonic daring that is impossible to imagine ten years earlier; whether its disjointed musical grammar has been planned or is the result of haphazard chance remains the question. This disorientated darting around the keyboard is meant, no doubt, to depict the whirling storms which threaten the snowdrop’s life, but there seems no real danger – the sound of the music seems still rather genial, if confused. At ‘Ei komm! Du weisses Schwesterlein’ the mood changes yet again as wind music is replaced by the bustle of communal activity. The departure of winter is made synonymous with music for the arrival of spring: without demur, the music changes into a merry mode (including Schumann’s favourite spring key of A major) to cajole the snowdrop away. The end of King Winter’s reign and talk of his livery (perhaps Schumann’s ugliest melisma ever is devoted to an elongated setting of ‘Liverei’) promotes a piece of busy nonsense of a kind one is more used to filling out the pages of the lesser Strauss operas where everything works itself up into a rare old tumult to no great purpose. Schumann seems to have become so preoccupied with the lordly status of King Winter going for a spring holiday (there are even miniature trumpet fanfares implied in the piano writing) that he seems to have forgotten the snowdrop completely. The departure of the stagecoach (the dancing phrases on ‘das schürze sich, das tummle sich zur Abfahrt schnell herbei’) is worthy of an operatic set-piece. The comparison with Strauss seems apposite, for he was a composer capable of note-spinning to splendid effect, especially when colour and movement were used to disguise periods of musical inactivity. Four bars of piano interlude based on an E7 chord and signalling the return of the snowdrop seem uncannily like an analagous passage in Schubert’s Viola. (It is something of an achievement for a song simultaneously to suggest the song-writing styles of past and future.)

The last page of the song reintroduces us to the slightly awkward vocal and piano writing of the opening. We return to music that attempts to underline the pathos of a flower at home in neither winter nor spring – belonging to both, and yet to neither. Under ‘Was soll um Winters Liverei der grüne, grüne Saum?’ Schumann invents a rich and eloquent counter-melody in rising sequences in the accompaniment that would seem better suited to a piece of chamber music than to this Lied. Quaver figuration eventually peters out and is replaced by crotchets and minims. The sweep of melody cedes to frightened and confused recitative. The questioning flower, its fate unsettled, seems to stand (as Sams has pointed out) for the composer himself who is ‘already claimed by some other more ominous realm, yet allowed to remain for a while’. The faltering and elongated prosody of the song’s closing phrase (‘wo ist mein Vaterland?’) exactly mirrors the confusing, and confused, fragments of speech gently mumbled by Schumann when confronted by visitors who expected enlightening conversation, and waited in vain. As this was some years before his internment in Endenich this song cannot be lightly written off as a product of illness. But there are many songs which are more lucid advocates of the composer’s later style.

Under the fingers of the pianist this song brings to mind the Requiem from the Op 90 songs with a similar flow of semiquavers underpinned by a strong bass line, the harmonic movement sometimes easy and ingratiating, at other times awkward and hard to punctuate into coherent musical paragraphs. In a song of this kind in Schumann’s later output the singer often has a hard time deciding exactly when and where to breathe; in the earlier songs this seems to be much more obvious. At times Schumann’s prosody seems perverse: the lines ‘Ich bebe dann, entglimme von allzurascher Glut’ surely need to be enjambed to make sense, preferably with a small break to mark the comma between ‘dann’ and ‘entglimme’. Yet the composer allows himself to be confused by the line as printed in the poem; he runs ‘dann’ and ‘entglimme’ together and separates ‘entglimme’ from ‘von’ with a dotted-crotchet rest. It is surely details like these which prompts Sams to see a marked deterioration in Schumann’s word-setting powers; at the very least he seems to have a different set of priorities as a song composer. Like Requiem, Ihre Stimme seems to be a love song turned into elegy by absence and distance. It is as if the voice of the beloved is not in the next room but is rather a distant memory, something that the poet has lost and can only summon up by tuning into the past. In this setting the memories seem not to be crystal clear, but indeterminate and hazy, like the chromatic descent at the end of the song on ‘mein Herz und deine Stimme verstehn sich’ which seems to fall away in uncertainty.

Sams hears in the opening of the vocal line the ghost of the melody of Im wunderschönen Monat Mai from Dichterliebe. At the end of the song there is also a memorable echo of the end of Er, der herrlichste von allen with the halo placed on the word ‘gut’ on the first hearing of ‘verstehn sich gar so gut’. Compare this phrase in your memory with the celebrated ‘wie so milde, wie so gut’ in the Frauenliebe und -leben song. Another earlier song also comes to mind because of the tonality of Ihre Stimme: the key of A flat for any lover of Schumann songs recalls the very first song in Volume 1 of the Peters Edition—Widmung, the first song of Myrthen and the quintessential anthem of Robert’s relationship with his Clara. That archetypal love-song has something of the fanfare and proclamation about it. In Ihre Stimme the composer is aiming for something much more inward, and it is true that the description of something heard and imagined by the inner ear needs a subtle musical language to describe it, a language struck dumb as it were. The song is touching and mellifluous without achieving great depth of utterance; it misses the anguish we hear in Schubert’s two settings of Platen (Die Liebe hat gelogen and Du liebst mich nicht) as well as Brahms’s Op 32 settings of the same poet. In Fischer-Dieskau’s words it is ‘a pale reflection of the poem’s emotional impact’. The title seems to be Schumann’s, or perhaps it comes from a later edition of Platen’s works. The poem dates from 1819 (not 1833 as Fischer-Dieskau states) and to entitle it ‘Her Voice’ is to change the gender of its original recipient, one Eduard Schmidtlein whom Platen nicknamed ‘Adrast’ and with whom he was deeply infatuated during his studentship in Würzburg. Platen’s passion was unreciprocated, indeed rejected with horror; the mood of Widmung would not have been appropriate after all. By chance, or perhaps through intuition, Schumann has caught some of the hopelessness and masochism of a lyric the background of which first emerged in a study written in 1993 (‘… bleibe ich doch wunderbar unglücklich', ed. Christian Mücke, Daniel Osthoff Verlag).

This slightly gruff music could have been Schumann’s An die Musik, a hymn of praise to the sweet and humanising power of song. But it was not to be. Sadly, both poet and composer busy themselves to such an extent with the depiction of the wildness and wickedness which music is theoretically able to tame, that the central message – the magical, healing power of song – is lost and forgotten in a welter of oscillating semiquavers. Schumann has succeeded once before in a song with a double message of this kind: Lust der Sturmnacht from the Kerner cycle Op 35. There the storm on the outside is cleverly contrasted with the feeling of cosy elation in being indoors, protected by love and domestic comfort. In this song, however, the contrast between the opening seven bars of storm, and the following seven of soothing birdsong are insufficiently differentiated, particularly in terms of texture and tessitura. Admittedly, the composer asks for a different dynamic level, but the rather clumsy words of Schöpff (or ‘von der Neun’ as he called himself) hardly help to make the contrast clear. Schumann seems unduly caught up with somewhat fruitless games of musical imitation, contrapuntal gestures between the bass and vocal lines as if to suggest (although none too clearly) that in passing from one register to another, sound reverberates through the world. This gives a rather portentous, and even academic, feel to the music. It is difficult to believe that this is the same composer who wrote those wonderful undulating fantasies in pulsating semiquavers, Eichendorff’s Schöne Fremde and Frühlingsnacht.

The second strophe poses even greater problems in that the poem wallows in the kind of grandiose imagery that is beyond all but the most extravagant musical expression, preferably aided by orchestral colourings. These words seem inappropriate for a strophic song of this sort. The rumbling bass octaves and the oscillating, flickering semiquavers seem just about acceptable to depict the flaming torches of strife, but once the righteous and evil locked in combat are brought into play we require an opera based on Ivanhoe at the very least! A Lied of two pages is not enough: we need at least fifty pages, equerries, heralds and all the other cast members necessary for a full-blown tournament. The final sentence of the poem which juxtaposes ‘friedvoller Lieder’ within seconds of ‘wilde Geschrei’ is a word-setter’s nightmare, and Schumann in his right mind would have avoided this slew of contradictory images – to illustrate one is inevitably to negate the other, reducing both to a compromise mush of something indeterminate and all-purpose. This is what happens, despite the bold crescendo and flourish that end the song as if a powerful point has been made. Madness has been banished forever as it is consigned to hell with the drop of a fifth.

If only this had been so. It is easy to see that the poem has moved Schumann because it tells him what he wants to hear: that the power of music is stronger than that of the madness that he so feared lay in store for him, and that if one keeps on singing, whistling down the wind, depression will be kept at bay. Thus he produces a song which, on first hearing, seems effective enough musically. Closer study reveals that the poem’s images are empty and all but unusable, that the poet makes large and meaningless generalisations. But before we blame the composer too harshly, much of Schumann’s inadequate response can largely be laid at the door of von der Neun.

This poem, every bit as flamboyant as Gesungen!, is concerned with heavenly aspiration: everything in nature is drawn upwards. Mother Earth is united with heaven, just as man’s soul will be reunited with its Maker. In the poem’s concluding lines, the author, barely hiding his self-satisfaction, counts himself among the phenomena of Creation destined for higher things. (Wilfried von der Neun may well have won his place in heaven for good works, but his poems would earn him no place in the Poet’s Pantheon.) Schumann, the man of cultivated literary taste who had been among the first to set the matchless poems of Eichendorff, now finds himself inexplicably drawn to texts more fulsome and ambitious but infinitely less distinguished and suitable for music. The grandiose words are ill-suited to Schumann’s innate modesty. Another composer would have attempted something embarrassingly strident, but this setting is more thoughtful than expansive, and the markings ‘Feierlich’ (solemn) and ‘Innig’ (introverted) moderate any tendency to overweening musical grandiloquence on the part of the performers.

A bel canto melody in A flat major of a quasi-Italianate inspiration moves to a middle section in B major, and then back to A flat. The vocal line of Himmel und Erde is almost memorable (for example, an effective upward leap for ‘zu des Lichtes Höhen streben’), but not quite. It is in the aria style typical of late Schumann, where work on opera and oratorio has altered (some would say clouded) the composer’s original pellucid conception of the piano Lied. The accompaniment is busy in an orchestral manner: the right hand with continual triplets while the left enlivens the texture with dotted quaver-semiquaver figures which punctuate the vocal line and propel it forward. And then an echo of the distant musical past. The turn on ‘Himmels Wolken schweben’ is reminiscent of the ecstatic yet courtly idealism that has animated Er, der Herrlichste von allen from Frauenliebe und -leben. In very similar harmonies, reference to the graciousness of the Lord brings about a mordent similar to that inspired by the lordly husband-to-be (‘wie so gut!’).

The second verse modulates to B major and, in this sumptuous tonality, May flowers and autumn forests are hymned with delicacy and intimacy. Much of the vocal line is mezzo staccato, and the piano figurations are similarly inflected, sometimes echoing the voice at a distance as if in diffident duet. Vocal duplets stretch languidly against pianistic triplets, and entwine, creeper-like, with fragments of contrapuntal pianistic melody. This is undoubtedly the most successful section of this song, and it seems prophetic of Johannes Brahms who showed a propensity for this sort of rhythmical cross-current from the beginning of his song-writing career.

The third strophe returns to the A flat major of the opening. Despite a feeling of recapitulation, this music is nevertheless newly invented within a structure that is far from a straightforward ABA. Although the older composer set himself firmly against Wagner, such was the power of the man’s music and theory that one detects Schumann experimenting with the flexibility of continual melody almost despite himself, and much against the nature of his own gift. To mirror the words, as if to show that heaven and earth are musically united, the piano writing blossoms with fragments of vocal melody, including the prominent rising and falling sevenths after ‘O so seid ihr denn Verwandte’. This tiny instrumental-like interjection would be well suited to an oboe. This writing seems dense even by Brahmsian standards, and it reinforces the impression that Schumann is no longer truly interested in the piano as an accompanying instrument: here he seems to have constructed a short score where an array of instruments might do better justice to the various strands of sound promising, but never quite delivering, counterpoint. The result is earnest (no one can doubt the composer’s heartfelt sincerity) but rather leaden. The poem talks of striving upwards to the light, but Schumann is in no state of mind to achieve lift-off. The work appears shackled by his less than ecstatic preoccupations. In the postlude, fragments of solo melody are grafted onto accompanying figurations. This sets the seal on the impression of a rather awkward-to-play short score crying out for something vividly imagined by the composer, but not quite realised on paper.